Lebanon Needs to Act First For Syria to Exit, Envoy Says

Published: March 14, 2005

Correction Appended

The special United Nations envoy on Lebanon cautioned Sunday that a commitment by President Bashar al-Assad of Syria to withdraw all troops and intelligence forces from Lebanon in the next few months was contingent on the formation of a new government by Lebanon's leaders.

''It will be extremely difficult to carry this out without a government in Lebanon,'' the envoy, Terje Roed-Larsen, said in a telephone interview from Beirut, after meeting with President ?ile Lahoud, Prime Minister Omar Karami and other Lebanese. ''This is why the internal political processes in Lebanon are now very important.''

Mr. Karami had been prime minister until resigning this month after large numbers of demonstrators protested the assassination of his predecessor, former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, an opponent of the Syrian troop presence and Syrian dominance of Lebanese political affairs.

Last week, however, Mr. Karami was asked to form a government, a task likely to prove extremely difficult because of Lebanon's turbulent politics. Under a pact that ended the civil war in 1990, the Lebanese presidency is reserved for a Maronite Christian, the prime minister is supposed to be a Sunni Muslim and the president of the chamber of deputies a Shiite.

Mr. Roed-Larsen announced Saturday after meeting with President Assad in Aleppo that Syria would carry out a phased withdrawal of its forces, in which, by the end of March, a third of its security and intelligence forces would be moved to Syria and the remaining two-thirds would be moved to the Bekaa region in Lebanon.

The agreement calls for an April 7 meeting between Syria and Lebanon to set a date to withdraw all Syrian forces from Lebanon, as demanded by a United Nations Security Council resolution passed last year. Mr. Roed-Larsen said Sunday that those negotiations could not proceed without a new, permanent government established in Beirut.

Mr. Roed-Larsen's clarifying comments came even as top Bush administration officials welcomed his Saturday announcement, calling the news of Mr. Assad's agreement ''positive'' and ''encouraging,'' though they cautioned that Mr. Roed-Larsen had not yet briefed them on the details and that they were not clear on several aspects of the agreement.

In multiple appearances on Sunday television talk shows, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Stephen J. Hadley, the national security adviser, concentrated their comments on the Syrian troop presence in Lebanon and the discussions aimed at getting Iran to give up what is thought to be a nuclear weapons program. ''Obviously there are some positive elements to this,'' Ms. Rice said on the ABC News program ''This Week,'' adding that it was ''positive that Syria would begin to withdraw its forces out of Lebanon, not just to the border.''

She said the United States would continue to press for ''full compliance'' with the Security Council resolution that calls for all troops to be removed in time for Lebanon's elections in May.

On ''Fox News Sunday,'' Mr. Hadley said that ''initial reports are encouraging'' from Mr. Roed-Larsen's mission but that ''we need to see the details'' and that ''it's going to be deeds, not words, that matter.''

Syria has had troops in Lebanon since the civil war, which involved fighting among sectarian-based militias and led to 100,000 deaths from the mid-1970's to 1990.

The accords that ended the war also called for the disarming of all militias in the conflict. All complied except Hezbollah, the militant Shiite party allied with Syria and Iran. The group's role in combating the Israeli troops that occupied southern Lebanon from 1982 to 2000 earned it wide popularity.

In their television interviews, Ms. Rice and Mr. Hadley repeated administration statements that the United States' priority was to get Syrian troops to pull out of Lebanon, and that they were willing to defer the issue of dismantling or disarming Hezbollah, which the United States lists as a terrorist group.

''First things first,'' Ms. Rice said on the NBC News program ''Meet the Press.'' ''When the Syrians go, you will see what the balance of forces really looks like in Lebanon. The Lebanese will be able to deal with their differences.''

On the separate subject of Iran, Ms. Rice and Mr. Hadley maintained that the administration had not compromised its tough stance against rewarding Iran in the negotiations to end what is suspected of being a nuclear arms program, even though it was announced Friday that the administration would withdraw objections to the Europeans' plan to provide economic incentives.

Senator Richard G. Lugar, Republican of Indiana and the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, the committee's ranking Democratic, praised the administration for its willingness to let Europe offer Iran a chance to join the World Trade Organization and gain access to aircraft spare parts.

In Beirut, Mr. Roed-Larsen said he planned to leave Monday to present briefings at the United Nations and then to return to Lebanon for discussions over Syrian troop withdrawal.

''It's important that there is a confirmation here of Syrian intentions,'' he said Sunday. ''It's important that all parties concerned are ready to continue their dialogue with me. This is the commitment I got in Aleppo and today in Beirut from all parties. In a difficult situation, it's important that there is an interlocutor they can all talk to.''

Mr. Roed-Larsen said he was encouraged by the fact that Syrian troops had already begun to move to the Bekaa region.

''Just in the last few days, there has been an active movement of Syrian military assets and personnel being pulled out all over Lebanon and moving toward the Bekaa Valley,'' he said. ''It's not only a commitment on paper, but we are seeing movements on the ground.''

Throughout much of last week, Syrian soldiers could be seen moving down into the Bekaa from various locations throughout Lebanon. Convoys began crossing the border into Syria as cheering Syrians, some trucked in by the government, celebrated the soldiers' arrival.

There are no reliable, independent counts of how many Syrian soldiers have withdrawn across the border; unofficial estimates suggest at least 1,000 crossed to the Syrian town of Jdeideh on Friday and Saturday. About 50 vehicles loaded with troops and equipment crossed Saturday night, according to Reuters.

Ms. Rice said it was not clear what steps the United States might support in the event of a Syrian pullout, but she left open the possibility that an international force could fill the ensuing security vacuum and prevent the kind of sectarian fighting in Lebanon that Syria used to justify its military deployment there.

''I'm quite certain that the Lebanese people may need some help in what is going to be a period of getting ready for elections, and then we will see what is needed after elections,'' Ms. Rice said on ''This Week.'' ''But I can be certain that the international community is ready to provide an international framework, if that is what is needed.''

Protests have been frequent since Mr. Hariri's assassination. On Sunday, hundreds of thousands of people gathered for a pro-Hezbollah rally in the southern city of Nabatiyeh, while in Beirut, a few thousand opposition demonstrators held a vigil in Martyrs' Square, Reuters reported. They held candles that spelled ''Truth.''

Photos: A rally called by the militant group Hezbollah in Nabatiyeh yesterday rejected an American role in Lebanon. (Photo by Lynsey Addario for The New York Times); Lebanese in Beirut yesterday used candles to spell ''Truth,'' a tribute to the slain former Premier Rafik Hariri. (Photo by Ramzi Haidar/Agence France-Presse -- Getty Images)

Correction: March 24, 2005, Thursday
An article on March 14 about the prospects of a Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon referred incompletely to the history of the religion-based assignment of Lebanon's top three public offices -- the presidency for a Maronite Christian, the prime ministry for a Sunni Muslim and the presidency of the chamber of deputies for a Shiite. While that system was codified under the agreement that ended Lebanon's civil war in 1990, as the article noted, its origin dates to an unwritten 1943 agreement, known as the National Pact, that led to Lebanon's independence.